Since 2005 Mari Carmen España has been fighting to exhume the mass grave at Puebla de Cazalla in Andalusia where her grandfather’s remains lie buried under a dump. Her tireless battle with the authorities is recorded in this ‘road movie’ documentary which has been screened in Germany, Sweden and Norway. It tells how two Swedish journalists, travelling through Spain, seek to understand how Spaniards of today relate to their country’s bloody history. They find it difficult to understand how the instigator of these mass murders is honoured, daily, with a Mass in the Valley of the Fallen, while across the length and breadth of the country the remains of the countless victims of the terror he unleashed still lie in their original death pits, unrecognised, unacknowledged — their murderers having escaped justice

‘This volume picks up where the last one ended, namely his leaving Britain to take part in an anarchist plan to assassinate Franco. Christie, however, was arrested by Franco’s secret police long before he completed his mission to give the explosives he smuggled into Spain to those who were planning the assassination. Christie recounts his experiences being arrested and his time in various Spanish prisons with assurance, humanity and wit. He is not afraid to talk about the failures and cock-ups, the bickering and the surreal along with the bravery and dedication. As such, it is a real treat to read, giving the human side which history books never really manage to do. His account of the characters he met and the life of political prisoners in Franco’s regime is engrossing.Flag Blackened

Autobiography is essentially an act of confession. Some people can’t bring themselves to do it; others just can’t be stopped. Sometimes what comes out is so unbelievable it’s easy to mistake it for fiction. In the case of “The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg”, you couldn’t make it up if you tried. Or could you?

Albert Meltzer introduced me to Farquhar in 1974, but the legend had already preceded him. I refrained from asking how much, if any, of it was true. What little I knew about his past seemed the sort of stuff you keep quiet about, if you want to avoid answering serious criminal charges, or stopping a bullet with your face. When Laureano Cerrada Santoswas murdered in Paris two years later I expected Farquhar to be next; so did he. Farquhar furiously committed to paper his experiences of a lifetime of anarchist activism, to leave behind an explanation of things which powerful and dangerous people would much rather leave unexplained.

This is the testimony of a man drawn into clandestine struggle as a naive but idealistic teenager, who witnessed the “heroic” days, and the not so heroic days, of Spanish anarchism and survived long enough to tell the tale.

FOREWORD (2011) This third and ﬁnal edition of Rogue Agents extends biographical information up to 201 1, particularly of the American allies of the complex, and of the core complex members — January 2011 marked the death of both Huyn and Richardson, and Habsburg died in July 2011 aged 98, whilst Fraga and Crozier live on. Violet – well, no-one has ever known. Recent university research on Interdoc and Franco’s Spain has been summarised and referenced; the section on CEDI has been much expanded; considerable information has been added on the Catholic groups Conseil international pour l’ordre Chrétien (CIOC) and the Comité International pour la Défense de la Civilisation Chrétienne (CIDCC) which involved Pinay, Violet, Dubois and Franco’s ministers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Pinay Circle - Rogue's Gallery (click to view)

This ﬁnal edition has therefore swollen to nearly 150,000 words; the full version now includes a documentary annex of some 175 pages of intemal documents as well as photographs of the main participants covered in this twenty-year investigation. This work has also expanded from text to video: the reader will ﬁnd, in the footnotes, links to online footage of Crozier and his key American 6I allies such as Romerstein for the International Freedom Foundation, and Huyn for the Center for Intelligence Studies (search for ‘c-spanarchives’ to ﬁnd all video links). As the documentary and picture annexes considerably increase the size of the PDF ﬁle, two versions of the book are now published: this full version, best viewed as a PDF (481 pages, 41 MB), and a shorter version (‘text only‘, 290 pages, 1.4 MB), containing the complete text, footnotes, sources and NSIC and IFF annexes, but without the documentary and picture annexes, suitable for emailing or printing.

Hispanist historian Professor Paul Preston talks about his forthcoming, long-awaited new book (September 2011): The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination during the Civil War and After (El holocausto español. Odio y exterminio en la Guerra Civil y después), a definitive account of the murders and massacres of civilians that took place during and after the Spanish Civil War, which remains a sensitive and controversial topic three-quarters of a century after the start of the war.

In a confidential cable sent to Washington in early 2007, shortly after Pinochet’s death, the US ambassador in Chile stated that the Chilean people were less resentful of their past and the dictatorship than Spaniards are of the Franco dictatorship. Albeit superficial and somewhat inaccurate, his remark can serve as a springboard for a quick venture into comparative history, regarding the similarities and differences between the two dictatorships and the way they are remembered.

Pinochet learned a lot from Franco. Like his Spanish predecessor the Chilean dictator tried to impose a view of history that would legitimise the need for his coup d’état and depict him as the saviour of the nation. During their dictatorships, Franco and Pinochet celebrated 18 July and 11 September respectively as the mythic events underpinning “national salvation” from Marxist revolution. This official version of things, embedded thanks to the control of education, censorship and harassment of anybody who dared take issue with it publicly, spawned disinformation policies and the massaging of history, and this proved very hard to combat during their respective transitions to democracy.

The Pinochet coup on 11 September 1973 was not the trigger for civil war and at 17 years his dictatorship lasted 20 years less than Franco’s. After murders by the thousands and massive trespass against human rights, both dictatorships enjoyed considerable support from their citizenry. Franco died in his bed and never had to worry about answering for his crimes against humanity. Pinochet outlived his authoritarian government by 16 years and his arrest in London in October 1998 provoked a thoroughgoing debate about the past, bringing the contrasting stories and memories of the military and of the families of the disappeared and the victims of repression flooding back.

The ‘Transition’ – Franco’s Appointee
(Spain 1975-1981 – French)
NB The man to the left of the picture, directly behind Juan Carlos 1, is Carlos Arias Navarro, Franco’s Director-General of Security and, later, his Minister of Interior and Prime Minister, otherwise known as ‘The Butcher of Malaga’ and responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of anti-Francoists. J He was never brought to justice for his crimes against humanity. Juan Carlos 1 appointed him the title of Marquis of Arias Navarro, Grandee of Spain

ANARCHIST/LIBERTARIAN FILM ARCHIVE

To ensure our popular film site keeps running — we need donations of at least £130.00 a month (appx $200.00, €165.00). This is primarily to cover the costs of our broadband and heavy bandwidth usage. So far one committed supporter is contributing a regular £20.00 a month — are there any other generous donors out there? PAYPAL donations, please, to christie@btclick.com

Post calendar

Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary